Pixel Scroll 12/11/17 You Ain’t Pixelin’ Dixie!

I woke up this morning facing a bright new future. The weight of the world has been lifted from Dan [Farr]’s and my shoulders. We have successfully cleared our names and lifted the cloud of accusation that has been surrounding us for 3 1/2 years.

– We were accused of stealing and hijacking. The jury said we were NOT GUILTY of this. There was no willful infringement.

– We were accused of trying to associate our convention with the San Diego convention. The jury said that we were NOT GUILTY of this. They found no evidence of false designation of origin.

– We were accused of causing $12,000,000 damage to the SDCC brand. They said we were the very worst offender. The jury found no evidence of damage. They awarded San Diego $20,000 in damages, less than .2% of what they asked for sending a clear message that we didn’t hurt the San Diego brand and this is what will be paid out for the worst of the 140 comic cons.

– We were accused of infringing San Diego’s trademarks, along with 140 other “infringers”…other conventions that call themselves “comic con”. The jury said that we were guilty. San Diego said, “They’re all infringers, that we and 140 other conventions that use the term comic con were guilty.” So for now they have 3 valid trademarks. We think that they will still lose “comic-con”. We’re proud to be lumped in with some of the finest comic cons in the country.

Dan and I have no regrets about standing up for ourselves when we took action after receiving a cease and desist. In hindsight, we would not have taken the car down to San Diego. For that we apologize to San Diego Comic Con. They are a great event with great people.

This process helped me realize once again that we truly have the best fans in the world. You have been there for us and it was comforting to have so many pulling for us. We are glad that we were able to clear our names at a minimum. But there are a lot of things moving in the background which I cannot talk about. All good things.

We own the trademark for FanX. There are over 140 comic cons and one FanX. That’s not a booby prize. If we needed to drop comic con from the name and just be FanX we have a trademark for that and a lot of positive brand awareness. Almost all the hundreds of thousands of people that have attended our events are familiar with that brand and name.

We’re not sure exactly how things will play out. We may change our name. We may appeal. But one thing is for certain. 2018 will be our best year yet….

(2) NEW LOGO. Bubonicon 50 takes place August 24-26, 2018 in Albuquerque, NM with Guests of Honor John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, Toastmaster Lee Moyer, and Guest Artist Eric Velhagen. Bubonicon 49 Toastmaster Ursula Vernon has created a special logo:

(3) THE CUTTING ROOM. I was very interested to learn How Star Wars was saved in the edit – speaking here about the original movie.

A video essay exploring how Star Wars’ editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became.

(5) LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY IS OUT. David Steffen announced the release of the Long List Anthology Volume 3, available as an ebook from Amazon and Kobo, in print from Amazon. He said more ebook vendors are in the works, including Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and others.

This is the third annual edition of the Long List Anthology. Every year, supporting members of WorldCon nominate their favorite stories first published during the previous year to determine the top five in each category for the final Hugo Award ballot. This is an anthology collecting more of the stories from that nomination list to get them to more readers

There are 20 stories in the volume – see the complete list at the link.

(6) BEYOND PATREON. Here’s the hybrid approach that The Digital Antiquarian will take in the aftermath of Patreon’s problems.

I’ll be rolling out a new pledging system for this site next week. Built on a platform called Memberful, it will let you pledge your support right from the site, without Patreon or anyone else inserting themselves into the conversation. The folks from Memberful have been great to communicate with, and I’m really excited about how this is shaping up. I think it’s going to be a great system that will work really well for many or most of you.

That said, my feeling after much vacillation over the last several days is that I won’t abandon Patreon either. Some of you doubtless would prefer to stay with them, for perfectly valid reasons: for high pledge amounts, the new fee schedule is much less onerous; some of you really like the ability to pledge per-article rather than on a monthly basis, which is something no other solution I’ve found — including Memberful — can quite duplicate; some of you really want to keep all of your pledges to creators integrated on the same site; etc. And of course it’s possible that Patreon will still do something to mitigate the enormous damage they did to their brand last week. At the risk of introducing a bit more complication, then, I think the best approach is just to clearly explain the pros and cons of the two options and leave the choice in your hands

As with Web’s Best Science Fiction, Web’s Best Fantasy is a 70,000 word “virtual anthology” selected from the fifteen webzines I’ve covered throughout the year, with the contents selected solely for their quality, allowing that some consideration is paid to having variety in the reading experience. The contents were sequenced as best I could with the same concern in mind.

Isaac Asimov introduces Theodore Sturgeon’s Guest of Honor speech at the 1972 Lunacon. There are corny puns and jokes from both of them, but primarily the talk is a serious, constructive discussion of Sturgeon’s “best beloved field”, and a defense against those that would marginalize and dismiss it. There are a few poignant minutes at the end about the (1972) US government amassing citizens’ private data, without any ability to challenge it. More than 40 years later, it’s still important, and worth listening.

(9) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Andrew Porter draws our attention to the fact that the German film Münchhausen came out in 1943. As he sees it, “We could have a Nazi film under consideration for a retro-Hugo!”

He spent fifty years at the University of Texas general libraries, rising from cataloger to Director of General Libraries, a position he held for the last twenty-five years of his career. … Harold also edited and wrote extensively about authors Edward Dahlberg and M. P. Shiel. Reflecting a long time interest in Arthur Conan Doyle, in 2006 he received the Morley-Montgomery award for his essay The Materia Medica of Sherlock Holmes. In recent years, Harold had turned to supernatural literary fiction, authoring such stories as “A Dead Church”, “The Monk’s Bible”, and “The Daughters of Lilith”.

In other words, the more the child could distance him or herself from the temptation, the better the focus. “Children who were asked to reflect on the task as if they were another person were less likely to indulge in immediate gratification and more likely to work toward a relatively long-term goal,” the authors wrote in the study called “The “Batman Effect”: Improving Perseverance in Young Children,” published in Child Development.

(13) WITH ADDED SEASONING. Star Trek: The Jingle Generation.

Darmok and Jalad at the North Pole.Rudolph, his teeth bared, his nose red!Santa, when the walls fell.

Probably the thing I like the most about The Will to Battle is that we get to know in much more depth the inner workings of the political aspects of the world that Palmer has imagined. We learn much more about things that we have only seen mentioned before (the set-set riots or the difference between Blacklaws, Greylaws and Whitelaws, for instance) and we even witness a trial, a meeting of the Senate and the Olympic Games. I really enjoyed discovering how the author had planned with incredible care every little aspect and finding out that little details that seemed to be arbitrary are, in fact, of crucial importance.

That hope is what drove Bañados, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in California, to the Chilean mountaintop in March. It was not entirely clear whether he’d be able to find a quasar so far away. Supermassive black holes swallow up huge amounts of matter, squeezing the equivalent mass of several hundred thousand suns into a space so small that gravity wraps around it like an invisibility cloak and causes it to vanish. An object like that needs a long time to grow and more matter than might have been available in the young universe.

But the object Bañados and his colleagues discovered, called ULAS J1342+0928, was even bigger than they’d bargained for — suggesting that something might have made black holes grow more quickly. Scientists don’t yet know the underlying reasons for such rapid growth, or whether still older black holes are waiting to be found.

“This is what we are trying to push forward.” Bañados said. “At some point these shouldn’t exist. When is that point? We still don’t know.”

In a companion paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists report another odd finding: The galaxy where ULAS J1342+0928 dwells was generating new stars “like crazy,” Bañados said. Objects the size of our sun were emerging 100 times as frequently as they do in our own galaxy today.

“To build stars you need dust,” Bañados said. “But it’s really hard to form all this dust in such little time on cosmic scales — that requires some generations of supernovae to explode.”

During the universe’s toddler years, there hadn’t been time for several rounds of stars living and dying. So where were the ingredients for all these new stars coming from?

(17) THE RISKS OF TALKING TO THE COPS. I saw Ken White’s “Everybody Lies: FBI Edition” for Popehat linked by a FB friend and found it riveting. While it’s focused on criminal law, a lot of this advice is still good even if you’re only talking to someone about your taxes.

Dumbass, you don’t even know if you’re lying or not. When an FBI agent is interviewing you, assume that that agent is exquisitely prepared. They probably already have proof about the answer of half the questions they’re going to ask you. They have the receipts. They’ve listened to the tapes. They’ve read the emails. Recently. You, on the other hand, haven’t thought about Oh Yeah That Thing for months or years, and you routinely forget birthdays and names and whether you had a doctor’s appointment today and so forth. So, if you go in with “I’ll just tell the truth,” you’re going to start answering questions based on your cold-memory unrefreshed holistic general concept of the subject, like an impressionistic painting by a dim third-grader. Will you say “I really don’t remember” or “I would have to look at the emails” or “I’m not sure”? That would be smart. But we’ve established you’re not smart, because you’ve set out to tell the truth to the FBI. You’re dumb. So you’re going to answer questions incorrectly, through bad memory. Sometimes you’re going to go off on long detours and frolics based on entirely incorrect memories. You’re going to be incorrect about things you wouldn’t lie about if you remembered them. If you realize you got something wrong or that you may not be remembering right, you’re going to get flustered, because it’s the FBI, and remember even worse. But the FBI would never prosecute you for a false statement that was the result of a failed memory, right? Oh, my sweet country mouse. If you had talked to a lawyer first, that lawyer would have grilled you mercilessly for hours, helped you search for every potentially relevant document, reviewed every communication, inquired into every scenario, and dragged reliable memory kicking and screaming out the quicksand of your psyche.

(18) MRS. PEEL IS NO RELATION. Bananaman: The Musical is on stage at the Southwark Playhouse in the UK through January 20.

Bananaman is one of the flagship characters in the world’s longest running comic, The Beano. He was also the subject of the hugely popular TV cartoon that ran on the BBC during the 1980s. With a useless hero and some equally clueless villains, Bananaman’s riotously funny, slapstick humour has been sealed into the memories of those who saw him first, and will now spark the imagination of a new bunch of Bananafans.

In “A Call To Action” Marc Pickering is playing Bananaman’s nemesis Doctor Gloom. The song comes in the first half when Doctor Gloom is planning ways in which to deal with Bananaman who is thwarting his plans for world domination!!

The first printing, also from Ramble House affiliate Surinam Turtle Press (owned by Dick Lupoff) turned out to have a botched variant of Russell Blackford’s chapter. My fault, I freely confess it! I only learned of this goof after I gave Russell his copy at the recent World Fantasy con in San Antonio.

Russell and I delved into the dark heart of several hard drives and managed to recompile his intended text. With the help of Chum Gavin, a repaired version of the book has now appeared on Amazon (although their website announcement has retained a mistaken pub date from earlier this year). If any Chum purchased a copy of the botched version, do let me know and I will hastily dispatch a Word doc of RB’s True Chapter. For those very few Chums who somehow forgot to rush their order for the book to Amazon, now is your near-Xmas chance to make good that lapse!

You’re probably familiar with Welcome to Night Vale, so you’ll recognize the Night Vale Presents line in this incredible and fascinating podcast. The key difference, however, is this one presents more of a focused story, all delivered from a single point of view—Keisha; a truck driver (narrated by the matchless Jasika Nicole) searching for her dead wife. Named, naturally, Alice. (One other POV appears later in season, which I will not spoil here, but it is eerie af.) This is a creeping, haunting, sometimes lonely story about a heartbroken woman struggling with a mental illness—namely, a panic/anxiety disorder, and the paranoia and fear that comes with. After the death of her wife, an experience she was not there to witness, our fearful protagonist hires on with a long-haul trucking service to find answers.

Her story is narrated through snatches of narrative delivered on CB radio.

So what makes this podcast the keystone for “don’t show, don’t tell?”

It’s the outside stuff we never see. What’s going on outside her narration, what the people outside of our view are doing and why they are doing it. The ripples “shown” in Fink’s writing remain so subtle that you may not hear them, understand them, until your second or third listen. They are small ripples, hardly noticeable in black water, bringing with them an expertly woven sense of dread. But why? From where?

We don’t know.

(21) THE CLASSICS. The comments are fun, too. (If you need the reference explained like I did – clicketh here.)

Unlike his previous cover-heavy albums, Meco started from scratch with the music. He and Bongiovi needed Star Wars-themed Christmas songs and they needed them fast, but they weren’t having much luck with the songwriters they approached. Enter a struggling composer named Maury Yeston, who was trying to put together the musical that would become Nine and could use some extra cash. “I met with Meco and I said, ‘Look, this may sound ridiculous to you, but if you want to do a Star Wars Christmas album you have to have a story,” Yeston told the CBC. “This is obviously Christmas in the world of Star Wars, which means this is in a galaxy far, far away, thousands of years ago. It’s not now. So call it Christmas in the Stars.” Meco was sold on the idea of the album having a through-line and recruited Yeston.

Yeston, who would go on to win a Tony Award for Nine and eventually write the smash Broadway musicals Titanic and Grand Hotel, cranked out nearly 20 Yule-appropriate tunes, nine of which made the final lineup. “The Meaning of Christmas,” minus Yoda, was radically retooled from the original version because Lucas didn’t want any of the traditional, religious-themed lyrics to be associated with the Force. It established the story of the album, set in a factory where droids make gifts for one “S. Claus.”

Playlist

[Thanks to JJ, Dave Doering, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Ed Fortune, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]

I’ve read the whole piece twice, and I still have no idea what she specifically means. What it is, how it’s done. She says it’s there, but she gives no examples, and I don’t know how a writer is supposed to learn anything from this.

9)
I also mentioned that Münchhausen was eligible for the 1943 Retro Hugos in the 1942/43 Retro Hugo thread. And while I understand anybody who refuses to nominate/vote for a German movie dating from the Third Reich on principle, I do believe Münchhausen is worthy of consideration.

The film industry was a big deal in Nazi Germany, well financed and supported up to the very end. Of the films it churned out, a minority are so-called “poison cabinet” films, propanda movies so toxic that they are still kept out of general circulation and can only be viewed for educational or research purposes. I took a film class at university to be able to watch some of those movies. They are indeed toxic, but also often incredibly inept as propaganda.

However, the vast majority of Nazi era films were apolitical escapism fare, musicals, melodramas, alpine dramas, historical dramas and the like. Some of these do have a creepy subtext emphasizing the importance of sacrifice, imploring women to be wives and mothers and the like. Occasionally, you come across a movie that is more blatantly political and yet managed to escape the poison cabinet, e.g. an (otherwise sadly well made) Titanic movie with really blatant antisemitism or a spy drama where the Gestapo are the good guys. Some of these have been retroactively shoved into the poison cabinet and with good reason, too.

I would put Münchhausen in this category. The scriptwriter was Erich Kästner writing under a pseudonym because he was banned by the Nazis from working under his own name. The director was Hungarian Josef von Baky, who continued making movies (some of them very good) without interruption after 1945, suggesting that he was not a confirmed Nazi. At any rate, he was no Leni Riefenstahl or Veit Harlan. One of the actors, Hubert von Meyenrinck was a gay man who according to Billy Wilder protected Jews caught in the streets during the Reichsprogromnacht/Reichskristallnacht. Another actor was also gay, one refused to divorce his Jewish wife, another actress supported a colleague who was driven to suicide by the Nazis and even attended his funeral, though this was forbidden. In short, it’s a movie made during the Nazi era, but not a movie made by committed Nazis. Ferdinand Marian is the possible exception.

Münchhausen has never been banned, not even in the first few years after 1945. Münchhausen is a mainly a fantasy adventure, very well made by 1943 standards. It also features a trip to the moon and a very early lightsabre type duel. No idea if George Lucas has seen it, though we know he has borrowed from other German movies of the era. Part of the movie is set in Russia and features no negative stereotypes. Some people see an antisemitic stereotype in the character of the villainous Count Cagliostro, though that may be due to the fact that Cagliostro is played by Ferdinand Marian, the same actor who starred in that most notorious of poison cabinet films, Jud Süß. You do get some orientalist stereotypes in Münchhausen, but no worse than what you’d find in Hollywood movies like Arabian Nights which was made a year earlier (and is eligible for the 1942 retro Hugos). There also is a really cringeworthy scene in Münchhausen featuring an actor in blackface. Interestingly, there are extras of colour seen in the same scene. One of them is Marie Nejar, one of a handful of Germans of colour who lived in Nazi Germany and later wrote a book about their experiences.

So in short, Münchhausen has issues – like a lot of Retro Hugo eligible works do have issues – but is definitely worthy of consideration. It’s also one of the very few movies eligible in dramatic presentation long form, because quite a few are under the 90 minute cut off point.

9) Yep, I hadn’t started to list items for 1943 in that thread (I thought those would be forgotten soon enough), but Münchhausen is a great movie. It is no worse than your typical american movie for that time with regards to racism. I would absolutely nominate it for a Retro-Hugo.

9) It appears that precisely because Goebbels was eager to have an escapist blockbuster produced that he waived various work prohibitions for the participants.

In addition to what Cora said, it might be worth mentioning that Erich Kästner was one of the 15 authors specifically called out in the 1933 book burnings (In the company of authors such as Marx, Freud, or Remarque).

9) Because the Nazi film industry was so important to the war effort, it also sheltered people who would have been deported or imprisoned otherwise. There were actors who protected Jewish spouses and in laws from deportation, a Jewish composer/songwriter who had to keep writing cheery musical numbers to stay alive and wrote some absolute stunners, actors who recruited for the resistance on film sets, etc… One actor who appeared in two of the most notorious poison cabinet films died in a concentration camp. It’s not always so clear cut and not everybody who worked in the German film industry between 1933 and 1945 was a Leni Riefenstahl or Veit Harlan.

I took the day off from work and at the moment I’m sitting in Starbucks reading Who Killed Sherlock Holmes by Paul Cornell, which so far (93 pages in) strikes me as an ingenious and well written yarn. I believe I’ve read that Cornell isn’t writing any more in this “Shadow Police” series.

The Starbucks environment is generally pleasant enough except for a male retiree with a loud voice sitting 2 tables away from me, talking nonstop. A few minutes ago he was reading and mocking “foreign” names from the newspaper (non Anglo/Franco names I mean; he seems to have a slight eastern Ontario francophone accent.). There’s almost always at least one loud-voiced idiot in these places.

@JJ: You’re right; this seems much more a realization that Alice Isn’t Dead has something intriguing the writer might want to capture, than an explanation of what that thing is.

Being a big fan of Alice Isn’t Dead, I think what Alexander is talking about is something like “writing with negative space.”

Alice frequently encounters things that are just subtly weird — or things that are deeply weird, but tied to obscure, mundane things, rather than huge epic threats. And most of the narration is meandering and quotidian, always dancing around the weird stuff, or touching it briefly and then veering off, as opposed to some kind of straight-up cinematic description.

I think that’s what Alexander’s trying to get at here — describing something by creating an outline around it, rather than focusing on it directly. But you’re right, the description really isn’t a very helpful one (compounded by linking it to “Show Don’t Tell”, which already suffers from being pithy advice with too many competing interpretations).

re: Münchhausen
ISTR Heinlein referring to Count Cagliostro in “Glory Road”, and there was the climactic fencing duel when Oscar got into the fortress of the Egg. Could Heinlein have been thinking of this movie?

Interesting, but IMO unlikely. The RAH of the 1940’s was (by contemporary accounts) a rigid type who would have disdained to look at anything by the enemy; he might have run across it in the ~20 years after, but I wouldn’t bet on it given that someone would have had to bring the film instead of posting a YouTube, passing a disk, copying a cassette, etc. Cagliostro is a name a lot of people have bandied about; Wikipedia has at least a dozen references to prose fiction using the name before it appeared in GR (1963) (I’ve half-fixed the fact that it didn’t cite GR itself), some very unobscure (e.g., Arsene Lupin), so he could have found it elsewhere in fiction or run across the story in non-fiction.

Some fantasy and horror films from 1943 longer than 90 minutes:
Cabin in the Sky
Flesh and Fantasy (it’s an anthology so not sure it works)
Heaven Can Wait (not the same as the later movie with the same name)
Phantom of the Opera (Claude Rains version)

And under 90 minutes:
The Ape Man
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
I Walked with a Zombie
The Mad Ghoul (AKA Mystery of the Ghoul)
Return of the Vampire
Son of Dracula
Or, you know, the individual pieces of Flesh and Fantasy

@Mark
I don’t think the “poison cabinet” films are banned outside the German speaking world, since I have seen a DVD edition of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (which is deadly dull BTW) for sale.

Oh yes, and by all that’s holy, stay away from Jud Süß the movie, if you ever come across it, unless you have a really strong stomach.

Coincidentally, the Heinz Rühmann pack includes a couple of good movies along with the poison cabinet stuff (in fact, I spot only two poison cabinet movies in there). I’d definitely recommend The Punch Bowl and The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. Zero propaganda content in those.

@techgrrl1972 @Chip Hitchcock
Count Cagliostro was a real 18th century occultist/magician and a contemporary of the real Baron Münchhausen and of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who mentions him in his Italian Journey. He is a pretty well known figure, so it’s not inconceivable that Heinlein has heard of him, whether he ever watched the Münchhausen film or not.

The list includes one John Dickson Carr novel but there’s another — The Hollow Man (1935, US title The Three Coffins) — that tickled me by introducing Cagliostro Street as an obscure part of London. Of course an impossible crime happens there…. Sounds like a place that Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit would visit during their offbeat London investigations. Perhaps they already have, in an adventure I haven’t read.

I was looking yesterday and found that YouTube has The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. You can get it all in one long file, or you can see it in eight parts (which happen to have English subtitles, so guess which one I’m going for).

@Chip Hitchcock: I can at least confirm that if you search for “Cagliostro Street”, with London somewhat zoomed in, Google Maps will happily point you at an occult bookshop. This may possibly be construable as “an easter egg”. Unless you happen to have London zoomed in, try “Cagliostro Street, London”.